I admire Alecky Blythe's form of verbatim theatre, in which people's speech is exactly reproduced, but I'm slightly puzzled by the timing of her play about the London riots of August 2011.

Within four months of the events, Gillian Slovo came up with a documentary piece for the Tricycle, The Riots, that brilliantly caught the feverish atmosphere of the times and the sense of young people exacting revenge for society's inequalities. Inevitably Blythe's play lacks that sense of journalistic immediacy.

To be fair, Blythe is more concerned with how communities react to crisis. In her superb London Road she suggested that people in Ipswich forged new communal bonds in the wake of a series of local murders. In contrast, Little Revolution shows how, in one particular part of Hackney, the riots exposed fissures between the classes in a deeply divided borough. Blythe is not judgmental but she offers valuable social evidence in which Hackney becomes a microcosm for many parts of urban Britain.

Blythe puts herself into the story and shows how she was tangentially caught up in the riots as they happened: in one episode, a group of looters catch her taking pictures and ask to inspect her camera before moving on. But the main focus is on the response of two disparate groups in the aftermath of events. Middle-class residents who live around Clapton Square start a fund to come to the aid of a looted local shopkeeper and hold a street party to bring people together.

Meanwhile, female activists on the adjacent, much poorer, Pembury estate start a campaign against the scapegoating of young people, stop-and-search police tactics and the social inequalities at the heart of the problem.

Blythe certainly captures the sense of a fractured community. One of the mothers living on the Pembury estate, vividly voiced by Ronni Ancona, talks of a local apartheid and says of the white, middle-class people living around Clapton Square: "It's all in the abstract for them, isn't it? Because it happens around them, not to them." On the other hand a married couple from Clapton Square, deftly portrayed by Imogen Stubbs and Michael Shaeffer, agonise about being seen as do-gooders and talk about trying to bridge the gap between people of different backgrounds.

All this is fascinating and comes across clearly in Joe Hill-Gibbins's production, which radically reconfigures the Almeida and combines professional actors with a community chorus representing local youth.

But I would like to have heard more young voices telling us about their privations and discontents. In an epilogue, Blythe also revisits a Hackney barber, strongly played by Lucian Msamati, in January of this year to hear his reaction to the verdict on the police killing of Mark Duggan: the event that triggered the riots three years ago. I suddenly felt this was the real story and that Blythe could have created an even more telling piece exploring what, if anything, has changed since the riots.

Her 85-minute play is good as far as it goes. But it doesn't begin to investigate whether the sense of rage and injustice that was so potent in 2011 has lessened or increased with time.